3) Kaurna Learning Circle
Karra wirraparinangku (From the Red Gum Forest River) is described as an acknowledgement and celebration of the Kaurna people, culture and country. Designed as a place for ceremony, cultural exchanges and learning. A welcome statement is inscribed in the brick paving Marni naa pudni tirka kurruru-ana (good you all come to learning circle). A tribute to resilience and persistence, the Kaurna language only survives because a few German missionaries wrote it down, whilst the British tried to erase it. A language and culture obliterated through colonial culture wars surviving as distant echoes in the memories of grandparents and elders. The language reintroduced and re-claimed, questions of recuperation... |
This is a backwards write up evolving as I post it and make sense of it.
Integrating with walks I have hosted in the past and in the present. Imagining Finding Country Scroll down for part 1 or read it in reverse order. Cut and paste entangled writing, there will be more pictures and some day references. |
There is a Welcome to Country on the shade structure which reads, Kaurna miyruna wangkanthi marni naa pudni, Kaurna yarta-ana (Kaurna people say good you all come to Kaurna country). These welcomes are beautiful and powerful provocations inviting respect for country. The recent vote on a formal constitutional status for Aboriginal people and Torres Strait islanders demonstrates how these generous welcomes continue to fall on the hard and ungrateful ground of the settlers. Given the result of the referendum in late 2023, this Welcome to Country and the related acknowledgement statements by Australian government agencies and businesses on their websites, marketing and stationary ring empty.
In North Somerset acknowledgements of colonial sources of income and how it was extracted or the impact of colonial wealth on the land and the local people who once worked it are rare. Currently owned by Business West, Leigh Court, above, provides an acknowledgement of the source of the wealth manifest in the building on its website...in the gents toilet downstairs and reputedly in the ladies too!
A not-for-profit business support organisation Business West is a certified B-Corp, pledged to meeting the highest standards of verified environmental and social performance with public transparency and legal accountability.
|
The Wangu poles, below, were designed by Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri artist Paul Herzich and consists of wangu (seven) large aluminium poles, laser cut with thousands of hand-drawn circles to tell an ancient Kaurna story of the relationship between the Wardlipari (the milky way) and the Karrawirra pari (River Torrens). For thousands of years the Kaurna people have used the Karrawirra pari to sustain their way of life. Find out more here: Wiltu Yarlu.
Whilst this this artwork embodies traditional ritual knowledge of the Kaurna community, the University of Adelaide campus architecture largely embodies the knowledge and values exported from Europe and imposed by colonialism. The columns, the frieze, the cornicing all resonate with Greek and Roman architecture forms rediscovered and promoted in the European 'Enlightenment'.
Behind the Learning Circle is the Reconciliation Garden here there are circular stone seating disks, compacted sand and garden beds with specific trees and shrubs from Kaurna country.
I thought that as part of the walk I would leave a stone I had brought from the beach in England where I grew up. It embodied something special for me and I thought it would be a meaningful gesture of reconciliation and connection. I was unable to make contact through Wiltu Yarlu with the custodians of the site and on site as we walked I began to question my motivation. The stone came back in my pocket, a matter of doubt. Click for more on the Kaurna Learning Circle from the University of Adelaide |
The London Plane proved to be very resilient and able to thrive in many conditions including the increasingly polluted cities of Europe and the empire. It is planted widely in Adelaide introducing an almost unknown phenomenon in the continent, an annual leaf drop.
Back in London the Tradescants had a plant nursery where they grew on their finds and sold them into a growing market of collectors. It is here, according to Tradescant mythology, that the first London Plane was found. The Tradescants 'Ark' was one of the first European botanic collections. As European plant hunters criss-crossed the globe the arboretum became a significant addition to the estates of those enriched by enslavement and colonial extraction, a museum of trophy plants. Through their plant collections the wealthy demonstrated their power, reach and knowledge in the display of exotic plants. |
Botany and Empire are inextricably mixed.
Plants were tested and acclimatised, local settler gentleman in South Australia set up an Acclimatisation Society dedicated to introducing and domesticating select “animal, insect and bird species” from the British Isles “whether useful or ornamental ... in the hope that they may be permanently established here and impart to our somewhat unmelodious hills and woods the music and harmony of English country life”. By the 1870’s many European plants for commercial use had been introduced to Southern Australia including wheat, olives and grapes. The import and export of plants extended a process of wealth extraction and terra forming at home and abroad. The European 'Enlightenment' passion for botany and the roll out of the Linnaen system of the naming of plants surfed the wave of colonisation. Erasing and deriding the indigenous knowledge systems that were before their arrival.
|
Adelaide
For the past 10 years most of my creative work was based where I was living, Bath (UK), the names of Bath-based enslavers became very familiar to me. When the University of Adelaide fellowship opportunity came up one street name in particular leaped out at me, Pulteney Street. William Pulteney was the enslaver and property speculator who funded Bath’s grand Georgian housing estate, with Sydney Gardens at its centre. It was the commissions in Sydney Gardens that opened up my current phase of work around botany and empire. Colonial occupation and place naming in Australia resonates in the gardens and in Bath Abbey with the memorialisation of Sydney's convict fleet commander and first Governor, Arthur Philip. Closer inspection of the Adelaide map and I saw a Bath Lane just running off Pulteney Street. I even found an Airbnb there! In the end the Airbnb was already booked and it turned out that the Pulteney I had first spotted had, like Governor Sir Henry Edward Fox Young, had been given someone else's name at birth. Our man in Bath had changed his surname as a condition of marriage, this man in Adelaide has Pulteney as a first name! He was Sir Pulteney Malcolm, the street supposedly named for him in recognition that he had recommended Sir John Hindmarsh for the South Australia project. Since moving down river from Bath I have been following exploring the stories and business empires of Bristol connected enslavers and their business associates, notably those on my doorstep, the interconnected dynasties of Gibbs, Brights and Miles. As ever, following Lindqvist's exhortation, to dig where you stand, starting where I live and walking from my front door. |
I walked those strange connections in Adelaide:
at the intersection of Angas Street and Pulteney Street where Bath Lane leads off there is now a hospital. The fine country house of the Brights at Ham Green near Bristol is now a place of sanctuary for people living with cancer.
Perhaps there's a metaphor there |
I am currently weaving the walks in Adelaide towards a cycle of walks in a triangle denoted by the country houses of 3 dynastic estates in North Somerset, the hinterland of Bristol (UK)
The Gibbs at Tyntesfield and Belmont, the Brights at Ham Green and the Miles at Leigh Court. They were enslavers and/or their wealth was derived from the labour of trafficked and enslaved Africans and other forms of colonial extraction. The Gibbs and the Brights used their wealth to fund the Great Western Cotton Company, the Great Western Railway and the Great Western Steamship Company. They bought the SS Great Britain as salvage and relaunched it in 1852 as a ship carrying economic migrants to Australia; the Bright Brothers, subsequently Gibbs, Bright & Co, were active in many forms of extraction and terraforming in Australia including wool and mining. I am interested in following the entangled business and social threads of these neighbouring and intermarried families and thereby grow my understanding of the impact and legacies. I am particularly interested in the land they transformed for pleasure and profit at home and abroad. Walking through these estates, sensing presences of enslavers and enslaved in the landscape, we acknowledge the buildings and land forms as sites of memory. . |